Archive:Digital

You may think you’ve read it all from people complaining that the likes of Facebook are threatening free speech. But this is a genuinely smart, thought-provoking article on the wide-ranging ways society need to rethink its approach towards freedom of speech.

We are particularly susceptible to glimmers of novelty, messages of affirmation and belonging, and messages of outrage toward perceived enemies. These kinds of messages are to human community what salt, sugar, and fat are to the human appetite. And Facebook gorges us on them.

I have thought before that we need to start thinking about ‘eating your digital greens’. Which means being wary of processed content (processed through an algorithm, that is), and ensuring you seek out a balanced diet of content from different sources and perspectives.

The way we build for the web right now feels problematic in so many ways. Instead of welcoming everyone from our teams with their various skills, we create layers of complexity that shut many out.

I sense this is deliberate, albeit in a subtly unconscious way. There is a culture among some in technology that seeks to belittle and exclude those who find complicated things intimidating. So development has grown in complexity over time, probably needlessly so.

Some observations from Paul Taylor on digital experience in Myanmar, where internet usage has skyrocketed recently.

For three weeks I’ve not dealt with any paper, any spreadsheets, and very few emails. I’ve negotiated seven hotels, seven flights, taxi’s and boat trips through a mix of apps, increasingly powered by automation and artificial intelligence.

In some respects coming home seems like arriving in the third world, rather than coming from it.

Westerners try to use their phones like tiny PCs. But because many people in developing countries didn’t have widespread access to PC, they don’t have those mental models. As such, they take fuller advantage of the capabilities of modern mobile devices.

As ever, Thomas Baekdal is brilliant and insightful on where traditional media companies are getting it so wrong. He compares the consistently negative focus of news outlets to successful YouTubers, all of whom are filled with “excitement and positivity”.

The Library of Congress has now stopped preserving all public tweets. In the words of Dan Cohen in this article, “The Twitter archive may not be the record of our humanity that we wanted, but it’s the record we have.”

I am amused at the idea of future historians having a highly detailed record of everything on Twitter up to the year Donald Trump got elected, and the year before Brexit is due to happen. What a cliffhanger.

Gary Andrews with some thoughts on what we might see in the coming year in the digital and marketing worlds.

There are lots of astute points here, not least on the hot potato of the moment: relationship between the tech giants and publishers.

One phrase that has been bandied around a lot towards the end of 2017 has been from publishers proclaiming their “pivot to readers”. At a basic level, this is the publisher’s way of saying we’ll no longer be beholden to platforms like Facebook and Google and will concentrate on building our own brand through focusing on our core readership instead.

The Economist considers whether the Unicode consortium is wasting its time trying to standardise emoji when it could be focusing on “more scholarly matters” such as adding characters from ancient scripts.

Given the popularity — almost the ubiquity — of emoji in modern-day popular culture, I would argue that standardising this form of communication is much more important than trying to digitise seldom-used or dead scripts. Even if that means standardising a frowning pile of poo.

Sticks in the ground for public services You know I love a bit of brutalism. Well here, Ben Holliday draws a comparison between civic architecture of the mid-20th century, and modern-day digital local services. Many of these buildings are now disused or in different states of disrepair. It’s an important reminder. The fact is, no…

I made my shed the top rated restaurant on TripAdvisor Brilliantly entertaining article by someone who managed to game TripAdvisor into ranking his fake establishment as the number one restaurant in London. When he staged a deliberately-awful opening night, some of the patrons asked to come again. The Shed at Dulwich has suddenly become appealing.…

There’s a digital media crash. But no one will say it A huge, huge, huge amount of digital media is funded by venture capital... The big picture is that Problem #1 (too many publications) and Problem #2 (platform monopolies) have catalyzed together to create Problem #3 (investors realize they were investing in a mirage and…

Designers, it’s time to move slowly and fix things Another reflection on how the culture of tech and design probably needs to change, this time from Basecamp product designer Jonas Downey. Designers and programmers are great at inventing software... Unfortunately we’re not nearly as obsessed with what happens after that, when people integrate our products…

RSS: there's nothing better This article summarises why social media services like Facebook and Twitter are a totally inadequate way of receiving updates from blogs and other websites. We had the perfect system all along: RSS. Yes, the technology is dated, but it remains the best at what it does and isn’t closed source or…

Fashion, Maslow and Facebook's control of social — Benedict Evans An interesting look at the parallels between the fashion industry and modern day digital trendsetters. The fashion industry does not set fashion - it proposes them. It tries to work out the mood and the zeitgeist and looks for ideas that might express that. The…

13 things I learned from six years at the Guardian – Mary Hamilton The departing executive editor, audience at the Guardian shares these pieces of advice, many of which would be applicable beyond journalism.

Getting titles wrong: what you can learn from our mistake - John Ploughman, Inside GOV.UK Getting the title of your content right is vital. When you get it right, users can find it and use it. When you get it wrong, it can really cause problems.

Why transformation fails – and how to avoid it – Paul Taylor A short but rip-roaring post about what needs to change about change. If you step behind the rhetoric of transformation you’ll see it is usually about reinforcing existing business models rather than truly challenging them.

Sympathy card to a front-end developer This developer actually was suffering a great loss: the death of his aging, outdated user interface. And his loss followed the familiar pattern of grieving—the five stages of grief...

Richard Thaler has won the Nobel economics prize for his work in behavioural economics. Knowing about this area is essential if you are a designer, to help you gain an understanding of what makes people tick.

When a former Google engineer's ill-informed anti-diversity essay became news during the summer, it shone a light on problems with the the tech industry's makeup. The diversity issue is the tip of the iceberg. A host of cultural problems face the tech scene.

Google's Top Stories algorithm is failing to detect authoritative sources - One Man & His Blog The Las Vegas shootings highlighted a nasty flaw in Google's Top Stories algorithm. It's one that could be exploited.

This month's digital design digest features a couple of articles about getting the most out of job stories. Plus, promising news from the world of CSS, how the Guardian is increasing its subscriber numbers, and where government goes wrong with digital transformation.

Our perspective on how a digital product should be managed is strongly influenced by our background and our role. That certainly helps explain some of the difficult conversations I have had over the years.

I was delighted to be given the opportunity to speak to my colleagues last week at IWMW 2016, the Institutional Web Management Workshop. I spoke about my experience building new teams at the University of St Andrews and SRUC.